Story Tools

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

When the CIA funded the venture capital shop In-Q-Tel in 1999, Silicon Valley responded with skepticism. Now everybody's a believer. Technology companies want a piece of the government's multibillion-dollar homeland defense budget, and In-Q-Tel knows how to get it. More than 3,400 companies have pitched to In-Q-Tel; its CEO, Gilman Louie, has invested in just 20. But when firms like Kleiner Perkins want to move technology from Sand Hill Road to the Beltway with minimal bureaucracy, Louie is the man to see. If there's going to be another bubble, it may well inflate around Langley.

Louie: People used to say, "This sounds kind of goofy. It's James Bond meets John Doerr." Then they saw we had people on staff who were CEOs before and had worked at companies in our portfolio. They saw we had the ability to take cutting-edge stuff and put it in front of experts at the CIA. The bubble bursting in 2000 helped us even more. In-Q-Tel became a pipeline linking young companies to government while protecting them from bureaucracy.

But then September 11 made every company want to be a defense contractor.I see a homeland defense bubble happening - everyone rushing to sell something to Defense or Homeland Security. The smart companies are striking the appropriate balance, where the government is not the only business strategy. For a lot of firms that come to us, the whole business proposition is a homeland play. They're putting all their eggs in one basket.

Does any of that technology actually improve homeland defense?Tech plays an important role when you're short of expertise. The ability to find documents - whether cables, emails, alerts, reports, or whatever - is very important. But it's like drinking from a fire hose. You can imagine the number of documents people are coming across in Iraq. Most of it's paper; very little is in English. It's not in a format suited to dump into Oracle [databases]. Yet one piece of paper might hold the answer to critical intelligence problems.

So what do you do?You might run a categorizer from Mohomine, a company in our portfolio. Mohomine can take scanned [Arabic] documents and say, "This document is about terrorism, this doc is about biologicals," and so on. Then you run them through the appropriate language-translation capability. And then those run through Tacit, from another of our companies, to determine who needs to use this document. Tacit allows you to find people with expertise the way Google lets you find facts on the Web. So you can organize documents and get them to the right people.

You must hear from your share of wingnuts.Once you put the brand out there - the CIA plus venture capital - it will lead to some pretty powerful technologies, or some pretty off-the-wall technologies. Two percent of our submissions fall into the second category. We get a lot of perpetual-motion submissions. Or the ability to talk to anyone in the world with zero latency. We keep them in a "best of" collection. Whenever things are going bad, we call them up from the intranet for a laugh before we get back to work.

What's the goofiest pitch you've heard?Somebody called claiming he had the ability to put any idea into anyone's mind. But it was so secret he was afraid to say over the telephone what it was. So we said, "Why don't you just beam it into our brains?" We never heard back. [Laughs.] That was probably the defining moment of In-Q-Tel.